Percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) has revolutionized the treatment of coronary arterial disease. A PTCA procedure involves the insertion of a catheter into a coronary artery to position an angioplasty balloon at the site of a stenotic lesion that is at least partially blocking the coronary artery. The balloon is then inflated to compress against the stenosis and to widen the lumen to allow an efficient flow of blood through the coronary artery. However, restenosis at the site of angioplasty continues to hamper the long term success of PTCA, with the result that a significant proportion of patients have to undergo repeated revascularization.
Stenting has been shown to significantly reduce the incidence of restenosis to about 20 to 30%. On the other hand, the era of stenting has brought a new problem of in-stent restenosis. As shown in FIG. 1, a stent 2 is a scaffolding device for the blood vessel and it typically has a cylindrical configuration and includes a number of interconnected struts 4. The stent is delivered to the stenosed lesion through a balloon catheter. Stent is expanded to against the vessel walls by inflating the balloon and the expanded stent can hold the vessel open.
Stent can be used as a platform for delivering pharmaceutical agents locally. The inherent advantage of local delivery the drug over systematic administration lies in the ability to precisely deliver a much lower dose of the drug to the target area thus achieving high tissue concentration while minimizing the risk of systemic toxicity.
Given the dramatic reduction in restenosis observed in these major clinical trials, it has triggered the rapid and widespread adoption of drug-eluting stents (DES) in many countries. A DES consisting of three key components, as follows: (1) a stent with catheter based deployment device, (2) a carrier that permits eluting of the drug into the blood vessel wall at the required concentration and kinetic profile, and (3) a pharmaceutical agent that can mitigate the in-stent restenosis. Most current DES systems utilize current-generation commercial stents and balloon catheter delivery systems.
The current understanding of the mechanism of restenosis suggests that the primary contributor to re-narrowing is the proliferation and migration of the smooth muscle cells from the injured artery wall into the lumen of the stent. Therefore, potential drug candidates may include agents that inhibit cell proliferation and migration, as well as drugs that inhibit inflammation. Utilizing the synergistic benefits of combination therapy (drug combination) has started the next wave of DES technology.
Strict pharmacologic and mechanical requirements must be fulfilled in designing the drug-eluting stents (DES) to guarantee drug release in a predictable and controlled fashion over a time period. In addition, a high speed coating apparatus that can precisely deliver a controllable amount of pharmaceutical agents onto the selective areas of the abluminal surface of a stent is extremely important to the DES manufactures.
There are several conventional coating methods have been used to apply the drug onto a stent, e.g. by dipping the stent in a coating solution containing a drug or by spraying the drug solution onto the stent. Dipping or spraying usually results in a complete coverage of all stent surfaces, i.e., both luminal and abluminal surfaces. The luminal side coating on a coated stent can have negative impacts to the stent's deliverability as well as the coating integrity. Moreover, the drug on the inner surface of the stent typically provides for an insignificant therapeutic effect and it get washed away by the blood flow. While the coating on the abluminal surface of the stent provides for the delivery of the drug directly to the diseased tissues.
The coating in the lumen side may increase the friction coefficient of the stent's surface, making withdrawal of a deflated balloon more difficult. Depending on the coating material, the coating may adhere to the balloon as well. Thus, the coating may be damaged during the balloon inflation/deflation cycle, or during the withdrawal of the balloon, resulting in a thrombogenic stent surface or embolic debris.
Defect formation on the stents is another shortcoming caused by the dipping and spraying methods. For example, these methods cause webbing, pooling, or clump between adjacent stent struts of the stent, making it difficult to control the amount of drug coated on the stent. In addition, fixturing (e.g. a mandrel) used to hold the stent in the spraying method may also induce coating defects. For example, upon the separation of the coated stent from the mandrel, it may leave some excessive coating material attached to the stent, or create some uncoated areas at the interface between the stent struts and mandrel. The coating weight and drop size uniformity control is another challenge of using aforementioned methods.
Another coating method involves the use of inkjet or bubble-jet technology. The drop ejection is generated by the physical vibration through an piezoelectric actuation or by thermal actuation. In an example, single inkjet or bubble-jet nozzle head can be devised as an apparatus to precisely deliver a controlled volume coating substance to the entire or selected struts over a stent, thus it mitigates some of the shortcomings associated with the dipping and spraying methods. Typically, this operation involves moving an ejector head along the struts of a stent to be coated, but its coating speed is inherently much slower than, for example, an array coating system which consists of many transducers and each transducer can generate droplets to coat a stent simultaneously. This coating apparatus enables to generate droplets at single or multiple locations simultaneously on demand, thus it allows to coat stent in a much faster and versatile way (e.g. line printing rather than dot printing).
Furthermore, nozzle clogging, which may adversely affect coating quality, is a common problem to spraying, inkjet, and bubble-jet methods. Cleaning the nozzles results in a substantial downtime, decreased productivity, and increased maintenance cost.
It has been shown that focused and high intensity sound beams can be used for ejecting droplets. It is based on a constructive interference of acoustic waves the acoustic waves will add in-phase at the focal point. Droplet formation using a focused acoustic beam is capable of ejecting liquid drop as small as a few microns in diameter with good reliability. It typically requires an acoustic lens to focus the acoustic waves.
The present invention provides a stent coating apparatus and method that overcome the aforementioned shortcomings from the conventional coating methods. The stent coating apparatus of the present invention can coat the abluminal surface of a stent at a high speed, and it can deliver a precise amount of coating material to the specific stent surfaces. Furthermore, the present invention does not use a nozzle, thus it eliminates the potential nozzle clogging issues.
According to the present invention, the stent coating apparatus includes a stent support, a coating device, and an imaging system. The stent support provides the mechanisms to hold a stent in place on a mandrel and to control the rotational and circumferential movement of the stent during the coating.
The coating apparatus includes a reservoir, a transducer assembly, and an ejection logic controller. The reservoir is used to hold a coating solution; a transducer assembly is used to generate acoustic energy to actuate the drop ejection from the surface of the coating solution; the ejection logic provides a control can over the position of droplet ejection. Transducers can be differentially turned on or off to steer the excitation of the droplets, and the droplet formation can be controlled only at the areas of the stent that need be coated. The advantage of this technique is it provides a reliable ejection of the fluids “on demand” without clogging the ejection aperture because the area of each ejection focal point is a relatively small region to the aperture.
The transducer assembly includes a plurality of transducers, RF drive device, and an ejection controller. Each transducer (e.g. piezoelectric transducer) can convert electrical energy into waves, such as ultrasonic waves. The transducer assembly generates acoustic waves and they propagate in the solution toward the liquid/air interface. Those waves are constructively interfered at a focal point of the solution surface, i.e., the waves will add in-phase at the focal point. The focused energy causes a droplet to be ejected from the surface of the coating solution. The wave frequency or amplitude can be used to adjust the droplet volume or droplet velocity.
In an embodiment of the invention, the constructively interfered waves are generated in certain patterns by controlling only portion of the transducers from the transducer arrays. Preferably, a switching system (or an ejection logic control) is linked to an imaging system to energize the transducers according to the stent strut position.
In an embodiment of the invention, the controller commands the transducer arrays to simultaneously eject droplets at multiple ejection points on the surface of the coating solution so that the stent can be coated simultaneously.
In an embodiment of the invention, the stent is preferably positioned above the ejector to receive the droplets generated from the surface of coating solution. In another embodiment, stent can be placed beneath the ejector. It will be appreciated by one of the ordinary skill in the art that embodiments of the invention enable to position the stent or the ejector in any orientation.
In an embodiment of the invention, the stent coating apparatus includes at least one assisted device, an imaging device. The image system is to track the stent strut location, to control the stent movement, and to communicate the information to the ejection logic controller. Accordingly, an imaging device with a feedback control is used to communicate to the stent holder controller to orient the stent to a particular position to receive the droplets generated by the corresponding coating device.